Sideways on a Scooter (15 page)

It was intimidating, watching these two very different women roast, grind, fry, and stir. Although my mother had cooked fairly complicated vegetarian meals for us growing up, and a lot of Indian food, it didn’t compare. A Western kitchen inevitably includes canned and processed ingredients to save money and cut down on cooking time. In any case, I hadn’t picked up my mother’s skills in the kitchen. When friends had stopped by my Brooklyn apartment, I’d offered them a glass of wine and some nuts.

In Delhi, I was alarmed to discover that no social call is complete until a hot meal is offered. Of course, this is less of a burden in a city where almost everyone employs a cook, but starting the day out by planning major meals with Radha was more than I wanted to take on. It was easier to plead American ignorance and let Parvati entertain me.

Because Vijay’s apartment was larger, we’d spend a couple of nights a week there. I loved staring out into the dusk from his window at the glowing white dome of the sixteenth-century Humayun’s Tomb, far away in the center of the city. We’d replace our outdoor shoes with clean plastic
chappals
from the pile Vijay kept by the door, and Parvati would exchange her
salwar kameez
for a T-shirt and a pair of his knee-length shorts. She’d only expose her legs if it was just the three of us, but even so I found it disconcerting—that’s how quickly I’d become accustomed to women’s lower parts always being covered.

One night, Parvati stuck a cassette of 1950s Bollywood songs into the tape deck—they both refused to buy CD players, let alone iPods. We headed into the kitchen to start dinner before Vijay got home from work. Because his kitchen windows didn’t close completely and there were no storage cupboards, my task was to rinse the dust off the pans while Parvati took a blunt knife to an onion. I found myself thinking of
the fancy tools most Westerners rely on in the kitchen, and considered how different my own experience of food was from hers. She was surprised when I said that most urban Americans grow up eating many different types of cuisine and buying vegetables without any idea where they are imported from.

“I guess we are still a very insular country compared to the U.S. or Europe,” she mused. “Maybe it’s because India was colonized for an entire millennium: first by Muslim invaders, then by the British. We held on to whatever we could of our regional and religious specificity. Most Indians don’t think a meal counts unless it involves rice or chapati.”

“But that’s totally changed now,” I prompted.

“It’s true. We are in love with your American fast food. College kids rush to McDonald’s after class to eat their McAloo Tikkis and all. But you know what? I guarantee you they all go home and eat rice or roti bread with their families. They all want a proper Indian meal.”

It took McDonald’s decades to break into the Indian market. When it finally succeeded, it was by Indianizing its brand. McDonald’s adopted the slogan “As Indian as you and me” and catered its menu to Indian tastes—no beef burgers, and a long list of spicy vegetarian items. Now every Delhi McDonald’s is crammed with teenagers celebrating a very Indian version of globalization. Parvati, predictably, found it disgusting.

“All this makes me feel like I belong to the old India. Do you know that before I went to college I’d never tasted any kind of food except Indian? When I landed up in a bigger town, to start college, one of the first things I did was try out the Chinese fast-food place. I’ll never forget the taste of those greasy noodles—so different from anything I’d had before.”

When Parvati and I were alone, the conversation almost always turned to her childhood, a subject we both loved. In spite of her unconventional lifestyle, Parvati believed much was right about her traditional village upbringing and liked to talk about it, as though to come to terms with how much she’d changed and the person she’d become.

“We lived in a big joint family, so my mother and aunts had to cook
enormous quantities of food. Hot meals a few times a day and everything from scratch—that was the only way. I loved it when my mother made green mango chutney: She’d lay out salted slices of unripe mango in the courtyard so they would dry in the sun. My brothers and I grabbed it when she wasn’t looking.”

I tried to picture Parvati as a village girl in a government-issued school uniform.

“My mother never once cut my hair. Every day she braided it down my back. By the time I got to be a teenager, it was below my waist. That was how all the girls in the village had their hair, so naturally I hated it. One day, I hopped on a bus to the next town and got it all chopped off. Just like that.” Her mother didn’t speak to her for days, she said, beaming with satisfaction at the memory.

It struck me that Parvati had reverted to the village-girl hairstyle in her adult life; she almost always wore it in a long braid down her back now.

I could understand wanting to stand out from the family; as a teenager, I’d done my best to resist my parents’ view of life, too—but, to my constant annoyance, my aesthetic and political choices had hewed pretty closely to theirs. They’d scarcely blinked when I dyed my hair red, pierced my ears multiple times using a needle, an ice cube, and a potato, and spent my high school weekends slam-dancing at punk rock shows. I’d had to work hard to come up with ways to piss them off, like cutting school and dating an alcoholic high school dropout. Of course, none of that was anything serious, whereas Parvati’s rebellions had actually shaken the foundations of her family traditions.

She tossed the diced onion into a pan already fragrant with mustard and cumin seeds and said that as a teenager, she’d once confronted her grandfather, the grand patriarch of her Brahmin clan. He was showing them a diagram of their family tree. When she saw that her two brothers were listed under her father’s name, she asked her grandfather why her own name was missing.

“He told me, ‘Well,
betee
, that’s how it is with women. When you marry, you will go to another family, and you will no longer have this name.’ So I just said very respectfully, ‘Dada, I am not going anywhere.
This is my family. Please put my name in.’ And he did. He wrote it in under my father’s.”

After that, Parvati declared that she wouldn’t take her husband’s name even if she did get married. She also informed her family that she did not want them to arrange her into marriage, the only acceptable destiny for a village girl.

“My father convinced the rest of the family to let me be. He was the one who understood that I am different. Now I guess the family just considers me a lost cause. My dad was the only one who would have dared to ask me about Vijay. The rest of them are afraid of me.”

The dark lines of kohl under Parvati’s eyes had smudged where she’d rubbed them, giving her a haunted aspect. She had rarely mentioned her father, other than to say that she’d adored him and she wished I could have met him before he died a couple of years before. I wondered whether his death had somehow made it easier for her to refuse to meet the family’s expectations.

She and Vijay had been together for four years, but I’d never seen them hold hands or nestle up to each other. Their Press Club friends must have assumed they were a couple, but I don’t think Parvati talked about him to anyone. In India, I was discovering, liaisons are given the “don’t ask, don’t tell” treatment, and even close girlfriends don’t confide in each other about their romantic lives. Sometimes, Parvati would call Vijay by a Hindi endearment, but he seemed ill at ease with her displays of affection. At the end of an evening in his apartment, she’d occasionally slide over to Vijay, but he’d remain rigid in his seat. It made me wonder why they didn’t just get married for the sake of practicality, if nothing else.

The earthy smell of cauliflower curry filled the kitchen. Parvati left it simmering and poured ghee, clarified butter, into another pan to start on the next dish. I worked up my nerve.

“Have you guys ever considered doing a live-in?”

Parvati tossed a handful of cumin seeds into the mortar and leaned hard on the pestle, grinding them into powder.

“You know what?” she said, her voice live with anger. “Forget call centers and fast food, okay? This country is stuck in medieval times in
so many ways. The trouble you had here, trying to get an apartment—it’s typical. If I was to live with Vijay, I would have to say we were married. Otherwise it would just be so much worse.”

Although she’d been living in her building for several years, Parvati said, her landlord still asked when her family was going to find a husband for her. Her neighbors were a little scandalized by the unmarried lady who worked in an office, drove her own car, and regularly entertained a male visitor. She said they would wait to hear her footsteps on the stairs, and then swing open their doors and invite her in for
chai
.

“Believe me, I always tell them I’m too busy.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad to me,” I said. “I like that sense of community you have in Delhi.”

Parvati had a habit of swiping her loose strands of hair back with her fingers when she was annoyed.

“You have to realize what it is they
want
from me, Miranda. It’s not just nice neighborly stuff. I know they will find a way to ask why I am alone. The moment they have a scrap of information, the rumors will start flying. Next thing you know, they’ll be calling me a slut behind my back.”

I thought about it.

“It must mean you have to put up a lot of walls.”

Parvati came from a village where everyone knew everything; having escaped to Delhi, she had no intention of explaining herself to the people around her. But my own break had been from a life of not especially belonging anywhere. In Brooklyn, my only reason to talk to my neighbors had been to complain if they left their trash in the hall. It was already different in Nizamuddin, and even though I knew I wouldn’t ever really fit in, I wasn’t about to let go of the hope of familiarity.

Parvati poured herself a whiskey from the bottle on the kitchen counter and gave me a sour smile.

“Just you wait. You’ll see. Delhi is an aggressive, conservative place. To survive on your own, you have to be a bitch.”

•   •   •

Diwali was coming, the biggest Hindu celebration of the year. Geeta cautioned that although it’s traditionally known as the festival of lights, in Delhi, Diwali is all about noise.

“In the old times,” she said, referring, as she often did, to a simpler India of the unspecified past, “it was supposed to be a celebration of good prevailing over evil. Now people have too much of money. They aren’t satisfied with candles—they go crazy bursting firecrackers.”

A week before the festival began, I started to wish I’d gone with her to Patiala for the holiday after all. Delhi became an explosives free-for-all, the noise intensifying each night, so that by the time the festival arrived, it felt like a full-scale insurgency. There was no city-sponsored fireworks display, just black vapors spreading out over the dusty flat plain of the city. In fact, the pollution and noise got so bad that in subsequent years, the city initiated a public campaign against firecrackers and limited their availability.

My cats retreated to a far corner of the apartment. I felt like huddling with them under a sheet until morning, but Parvati’s mother was visiting, and they’d cooked a special meal of festival foods. I forced myself out of the apartment when I heard K.K. pull up with a squeal. He had his own stockpile of firecrackers on the passenger seat and was eager to get back to the taxi stand to set them off.

“Top-class crackers, Miss Mirindaah! Pukka quality, making many bangs all in one go.” K.K. sped us through the smoky streets, only adding to the sensation that we were trying to escape to safety through a war zone.

Parvati’s place was a white sanctuary, lit only by small oil lamps and flashes of color from the firecrackers outside. She and her mother were on the bed, which served as a sort of family den, much like Joginder and Maniya’s charpoy. Parvati’s mother was a tiny, elegant woman in a crisp white sari, her hair neatly combed back from her face. I folded my hands into a respectful gesture of greeting: “
Namaste
, Auntie.”

“Namaste,”
she replied, and then corrected herself with an English hello. I sat down and practiced my Hindi sentence structures on her until Parvati rescued us both by reverting to English. Her mother picked up a Hindi-language magazine.

Although Parvati’s father had learned English in high school, her mother’s education had ended in the fifth grade, when she was expected to prepare for marriage by mastering domestic skills. You wouldn’t know it from educated middle-class circles in Delhi and Mumbai, but fewer than a third of Indians speak English. There are twenty-one other official languages in India, not to mention 844 officially recognized dialects and thousands of other unofficial ones.

English was, of course, the language of the British colonialists, but Indians used English words to communicate with foreign traders as far back as the seventeenth century. They spoke a pidgin dialect known as
Firangi
, which has the same root as
feringhee
. During the independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi called the English language a symbol of colonialism, even going so far as to say, “To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them.” But when India’s leaders proposed Hindi as an alternative, South Indian politicians denounced that, too, as “language imperialism.” Because Hindi has never been spoken in South India, choosing India’s official language was the single greatest controversy in the writing of the Indian constitution. Since no single tongue could satisfy India’s heterogeneity, Hindi was named the “official language of the union,” with English to be used for “official purposes of the union.”

Today, English is spoken in the courts and financial markets. It is much more than bureaucratic babu-speak, though; it is the language of those who aspire to a better life. Like many lower-middle-class Indians, Parvati had spoken her local dialect at home and learned Hindi at school. English was her third language, and it was only with persistence that she became fluent. For many Indians, the effect of the fractured language policy is that they end up speaking multiple dialects badly.